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Rural kids, parents angry about Labor Dept. rule banning farm chores
Daily Caller ^ | April 25, 2012 | Patrick Richardson

Posted on 04/25/2012 6:26:12 AM PDT by No One Special

A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores has drawn plenty of criticism from rural-district members of Congress. But now it’s attracting barbs from farm kids themselves.

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child-labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA , replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

Rossie Blinson, a 21-year-old college student from Buis Creek, N.C., told The Daily Caller that the federal government’s plan will do far more harm than good.

“The main concern I have is that it would prevent kids from doing 4-H and FFA projects if they’re not at their parents’ house,” said Blinson.

“I started showing sheep when I was four years old. I started with cattle around 8. It’s been very important. I learned a lot of responsibility being a farm kid.”

In Kansas, Cherokee County Farm Bureau president Jeff Clark was out in the field — literally on a tractor — when TheDC reached him. He said if Solis’s regulations are implemented, farming families’ labor losses from their children will only be part of the problem.

“What would be more of a blow,” he said, “is not teaching our kids the values of working on a farm.”

The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the average age of the American farmer is now over 50 .

“Losing that work-ethic — it’s so hard to pick this up later in life,” Clark said. “There’s other ways to learn how to farm, but it’s so hard. You can learn so much more working on the farm when you’re 12, 13, 14 years old.”

John Weber, 19, understands this. The Minneapolis native grew up in suburbia and learned the livestock business working summers on his relatives’ farm.

He’s now a college Agriculture major.

“I started working on my grandparent’s and uncle’s farms for a couple of weeks in the summer when I was 12,” Weber told TheDC. “I started spending full summers there when I was 13.”

“The work ethic is a huge part of it. It gave me a lot of direction and opportunity in my life. If they do this it will prevent a lot of interest in agriculture. It’s harder to get a 16 year-old interested in farming than a 12 year old.”

Weber is also a small businessman. In high school, he said, he took out a loan and bought a few steers to raise for income. “Under these regulations,” he explained, “I wouldn’t be allowed to do that.”

In February the Labor Department seemingly backed away from what many had called an unrealistic reach into farmers’ families, reopening the public comment period on a section of the regulations designed to give parents an exemption for their own children.

But U.S. farmers’ largest trade group is unimpressed.

“American Farm Bureau does not view that as a victory,” said Kristi Boswell, a labor specialist with the American Farm Bureau Federation. “It’s a misconception that they have backed off on the parental exemption.”

Boswell chafed at the government’s rationale for bringing farms strictly into line with child-labor laws.

“They have said the number of injuries are higher for children than in non-ag industries,” she said. But everyone in agriculture, Boswell insisted, “makes sure youth work in tasks that are age-appropriate.”

The safety training requirements strike many in agriculture as particularly strange, given an injury rate among young people that is already falling rapidly.

According to a United States Department of Agriculture study , farm accidents among youth fell nearly 40 percent between 2001 and 2009, to 7.2 injuries per 1,000 farms.

Clark said the regulations are vague and meddlesome.

“It’s so far-reaching,” he exclaimed, “kids would be prohibited from working on anything ‘power take-off’ driven, and anything with a work-height over six feet — which would include the tractor I’m on now.”

The way the regulations are currently written, he added, would prohibit children under 16 from using battery powered screwdrivers, since their motors, like those of a tractor, are defined as “power take-off driven.”

And jobs that could “inflict pain on an animal” would also be off-limits for kids. But “inflicting pain,” Clark explained, is left undefined: If it included something like putting a halter on a steer, 4-H and FFA animal shows would be a thing of the past.

In a letter to The Department of Labor in December, Montana Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg complained that the animal provision would also mean young people couldn’t “see veterinary medicine in practice … including a veterinarian’s own children accompanying him or her to a farm or ranch.”

Boswell told TheDC that the new farming regulations could go into effect as early as August. She claimed farmers could soon find The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division inspectors on their land, citing them for violations.

“In the last three years that division has grown 30 to 40 percent,” Boswell said. Some Farm Bureau members, she added, have had inspectors on their land checking on conditions for migrant workers, only to be cited for allowing their own children to perform chores that the Labor Department didn’t think were age-appropriate.

It’s something Kansas Republican Senator Jerry Moran believes simply shouldn’t happen.

During a March 14 hearing, Moran blasted Hilda Solis for getting between rural parents and their children.

“The consequences of the things that you put in your regulations lack common sense,” Moran said.

“And in my view, if the federal government can regulate the kind of relationship between parents and their children on their own family’s farm, there is almost nothing off-limits in which we see the federal government intruding in a way of life.”

The Department of Labor did not respond to repeated requests for comment.


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Constitution/Conservatism; Extended News; Government
KEYWORDS: assaultonfamilies; communism; democratassault; families; farming; powergrab; thuggishness; tyranny
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1 posted on 04/25/2012 6:26:14 AM PDT by No One Special
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To: No One Special

Previous thread:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2876308/posts


2 posted on 04/25/2012 6:27:13 AM PDT by humblegunner
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To: No One Special
Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a filthy little commie pig, is making a bald faced attempt to destroy all family farms ~ and replace them with Soviet kholkhoz methods AND Chicom communes.

This Stalinist apparatchik must be purged

3 posted on 04/25/2012 6:31:00 AM PDT by muawiyah
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To: No One Special

“The Department of Labor did not respond to repeated requests for comment.”

You must obey.


4 posted on 04/25/2012 6:32:20 AM PDT by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose of a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped.)
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To: No One Special

I suspect the motivation for this stupid thing is to make American farmers even more reliant on illegal labor. Has nothing whatsoever to do with protecting children.


5 posted on 04/25/2012 6:33:41 AM PDT by Lizavetta (You get what you tolerate)
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To: No One Special
We are no longer free... Every second of our lives will be dictated by government. We must vote these A-holes out and that means republicans too. Replace them with everyday people who know what it is like to earn a living, pay taxes,live within a budget, balance a check book and raise a family.
Put down the McDonald's burger, turn off Ellen, The View, and the sports channel and get involved. Your children's future depends on it.
6 posted on 04/25/2012 6:33:54 AM PDT by baddog 219
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To: No One Special

That is insane! These people are absolutely nuts, they have to stop them before they totally destroy this country.


7 posted on 04/25/2012 6:34:06 AM PDT by McGavin999
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To: No One Special

More governmental intrusion in areas where they have NO business, IMO. The American farming family has done just fine without Big Bro’s intrusions on what the kids can or cannot do. Kids growing up on farms know they have chores, and guess what, they grow to be some of our most productive citizens (just my opinion). We can’t have that now, can we?

FUBO


8 posted on 04/25/2012 6:34:12 AM PDT by Mich Patriot (We can't have economic progress...there is a slug somewhere that needs to be saved. MP)
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To: muawiyah

There are so many of them surrounding the Clown in Charge


9 posted on 04/25/2012 6:35:15 AM PDT by jospehm20
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To: No One Special
A proposal from the Obama administration to prevent children from doing farm chores

All you need is the government!

If people don't see the total & utter destruction that is happening piece by piece in America, they're blind.

God help us all.

10 posted on 04/25/2012 6:35:18 AM PDT by Puppage (You may disagree with what I have to say, but I shall defend to your death my right to say it)
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To: No One Special
If my father didn't have me in my teen years he wouldn't be able to get his 800 acres of cotton and soybeans out. We are under a tyranny.
11 posted on 04/25/2012 6:36:43 AM PDT by Sybeck1 (If Romney needs my vote to win Mississippi, he is in a heck of a lot trouble more than me.)
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To: Lizavetta

In understanding the Luciferian agenda, it’s not about illegals, either, it’s about FAMILIES as an autonomous unit of society.

They hate that.


12 posted on 04/25/2012 6:37:24 AM PDT by MrB (The difference between a Humanist and a Satanist - the latter knows whom he's working for)
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To: No One Special

I have never met an OSHA inspector who thought that kids working on the farm was OK.


13 posted on 04/25/2012 6:37:44 AM PDT by redgolum ("God is dead" -- Nietzsche. "Nietzsche is dead" -- God.)
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To: No One Special

“And in my view, if the federal government can regulate the kind of relationship between parents and their children on their own family’s farm, there is almost nothing off-limits in which we see the federal government intruding in a way of life.”

Exactly. These bastards won’t stop until they are controlling everything that goes in or out of our eyes, minds, and bodies.

This is full-out war on what America is all about. Everything about this foreign enemy combatant in the White House is geared toward destroying the fabric of this nation and turning it into bottom-feeding scum.


14 posted on 04/25/2012 6:39:41 AM PDT by butterdezillion
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To: No One Special

....farmers could soon find The Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division inspectors on their land, citing them for violations.....

I can say that in a lot of states this will effect there is a lot of empty ground, in out of the way places that “DOL Wage and Hour Division inspectors” could get “lost” in trying to reach farms/ranches to enforce this law. West Texas, parts of Idaho, Montana. This just plain stupid.


15 posted on 04/25/2012 6:39:45 AM PDT by rustyboots
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To: No One Special

The oppressive federal government has to keep teenagers from helping on their family farms “as soon as August.” After all, illegal aliens are looking for work or they’ll go back to Mexico and the Democrats will be deprived of their votes in November.

There will be hell to pay in farm country when the pencil pushers come out to check on this outrageous rule. Democrat legislators will be thrown out of office in rural districts.


16 posted on 04/25/2012 6:39:48 AM PDT by txrefugee
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To: No One Special

Typical top-down meddling from this crowd; google the depression-era Schecter Brothers from Brooklyn for an amusing look at this kind of thing.


17 posted on 04/25/2012 6:39:59 AM PDT by 4buttons
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To: jospehm20

“There are so many of them surrounding the Clown in Charge”

Everywhere you look; how many Van Jones/Anita Dunns/Valerie Jarrets does it take to convince a person?


18 posted on 04/25/2012 6:42:50 AM PDT by 4buttons
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To: No One Special
I don't know nor can I conceive of any farm or ranch families that will take this seriously.
19 posted on 04/25/2012 6:44:43 AM PDT by montanajoe
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To: MrB

The concept of families as the basic unit of society is the chief competitor to the communist view of the government as the basic unit of society. Who should tuck the children in bed? Who should teach them about life? Who should feed and clothe them? The reason the communists need to destroy the US economy and make sure that people don’t have jobs is because if people have jobs they will be able to provide for their families; if they have no job the government will have to step in and become the provider, protector, teacher, etc for all the kids.

Hitler did the same thing in Germany. Anything he could do to get the kids away from the influence of their parents.

Some of the kids at school recommended that I read a book called “The Giver” (can’t remember the author). Very thought-provoking. It’s where the society has chosen to control every aspect of life so all outcomes are known and the same. There are no families. There is no love. There is no freedom. It’s very safe, very comfortable. But very fake.

Very much like what Obama is trying to shape this country into being.


20 posted on 04/25/2012 6:46:42 AM PDT by butterdezillion
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